


Baby it's a violent world

by viverella



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 09:25:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1813441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Bucky find each other and find each other and find each other. Their lives, as told through a series of vignettes. </p><p>(Soulmates AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby it's a violent world

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Baby It's A Violent World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2601038) by [joankindom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joankindom/pseuds/joankindom)



> inspired by [this amazing tumblr post](http://savingsergeantbarnes.tumblr.com/post/84609690338/wintorsoldier-owynsama-apharthurkirklands) about a soulmate au in which you see the world in black and white until you meet your soulmate and then after they die you see in black and white again. it kept bouncing around my dash and started a plot bunny in my head that just wouldn't stop. I blame you for this one, tumblr. 
> 
> bonus: here's a fun drinking game to go with this fic - every time you read the word 'red,' take a shot. seriously. I have no idea how the color red wound up in this fic so many times, but it kind of works, so I'm just going to leave it I guess.
> 
> (and yes, I know that I glossed over the recovery a bit or a lot or whatever. I have a tendency to do that and anyways I'm writing a massive post-tws recovery fic for the stevebucky big bang so I'm never in the mood to dwell too much on the recovery these days in my other fics oops)
> 
> title borrowed from Coldplay

**I.**

Steve Rogers has always lived his life in dazzling Technicolor. He barely remembers the dull years, the years before Bucky, the years when the world spread out in front of him in shades of grey. And the more time he spends blissfully, carefully in love, living together, sharing everything, the more the black and white world of his early years fade away in favor of the piercing blue of Bucky’s eyes and the gut-wrenching red of Bucky’s mouth and the way the entire room lights up when he laughs, head thrown back, eyes crinkling around the edges.

There’s a point, when Steve is twenty-two and Bucky is just turning twenty-four and Steve shows Bucky a stack of drawings that Steve made for Bucky and Bucky smiles, soft and gentle like he almost never lets show, and kisses Steve in the quiet safety of their apartment where no one can see them and spit poisonous words at them or raise their fists against them or threaten to call the police, there is a point when Steve thinks that maybe he’ll get the chance to live in color forever, just the two of them tucked away in some quiet corner of the universe. And maybe they’ll always be poor, the two of them, no discernable profitable skills between them, struggling to make the money go further than it can, going hungry some nights, but always, always warm, wrapped around each other, and Steve thinks that he’d be okay if he never got to be a proper artist if it meant staying here with Bucky, the two of them picking up odd jobs when they could to try to bring home a little more money and living out their days in ecstatic color. 

Nine months later, Pearl Harbor is bombed, and Steve realizes it was all just a fantasy after all.

  
**II.**

Bucky Barnes is a little older than Steve and a little more cynical, and he remembers more clearly the years filled with static, the six, no _seven_ years of his life filled with nothing but grey, remembers exactly the day that his world lit up like a candle, glowing, beautiful for the first time in his entire life.

Bucky remembers chasing away a group of bullies and saying to a scrawny kid, small even for his age, “Why don’t you pick on guys your own size?”

Bucky remembers him refusing Bucky’s offer to help him up, remembers him pressing a hand to his mouth and how it came away a brilliant, bright red that caught Bucky so off guard that he’d stumbled back a few steps. He remembers blinking, as if worried that his mind was playing tricks on him, remembers how every time he opened his eyes, the world was a little brighter around him, a little more colorful, and he remembers thinking about the stories his ma always told him, about how the person you were meant to be with could light you up from the inside in a way that no one else could see. 

“Guys my size don’t usually need to be picked on,” Bucky remembers Steve saying to him, pale skin already purpling at his jaw. 

And Bucky had been terrified of what it all meant at the time, because two _men_? No one ever said that this could happen, that this was right, that this could be, but as the years pass and Steve stays in Bucky’s life and moves into an apartment with him and shares a bed and a life and everything with him like he’s not afraid, Bucky starts seeing things a little differently. Because Steve is small still even as an adult, not more than five-foot-four and maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, and Steve is still more fire and courage than strength, and Bucky still gets anxious Steve goes out and takes too long coming back home. And when they go to sleep at night, Steve tucking his face into where the base of Bucky’s neck meets his shoulder, breathing soft and often belabored, Bucky keeps finding himself thinking, wishing, hoping that Steve never goes anywhere he can’t follow.

And then the war comes to America. Bucky leaves. Steve doesn’t. The whole night before he ships out, Bucky presses his mouth to every inch of Steve’s pale skin that he can reach like a promise, wondering what the hell he’s supposed to do now.

  
**III.**

Steve makes his own way to the war, a fight that becomes just as much about finding Bucky before he’s killed as it is about doing the right thing. He goes on tour as Captain America, parading around in his ridiculous outfit in a body too big for him because he’s seen the itinerary and knows that eventually, eventually, all roads lead to the battlefield. Steve wakes up every morning gasping and afraid, desperately blinking the sleep out of his eyes until he’s certain that he can see the blue of the sky outside and the pink in his own skin. Steve clings to the color in his life like it’s the only thing worth living for, even as he plasters on smiles and poses for pictures and says all the things he’s supposed to say as the Army’s new poster boy.

Sometimes, though, sometimes in the weeks leading up to his arrival in Italy to perform for the troops, the world feels like it’s shaking all around him and everything seems to flicker, blinking, just for an instant, into black, and Steve would write it all off as just something in his head, something his paranoia is cooking up to slowly drive him crazy, except that he knows that Bucky is out there risking his life every day, except that he can feel it in his bones every time the world flicks into grey for just a second that Bucky is in danger. It gets worse as time wears on and by the time Steve makes it to Italy, by the time Peggy sits down next to him in the middle of the waterlogged camp and says, “Your audience contained what was left of the 107th,” Steve can feel the darkness creeping in on the edges of his vision, always lingering in the periphery but always there, looming, terrifying. 

Steve jumps out of a plane into Austria because he can still see the red of Peggy’s lipstick and the blue of the helmet that he steals and that’s enough to tell him that Bucky’s alive, captured, dying maybe, but still alive and he needs Steve, needs Steve like Steve always needed Bucky, and Steve would rather die trying to find him than wake up one morning and find that his eyes have gone grey.

  
**IV.**

The only thing that keeps Bucky going through the grueling days of war and mud and cold is the fact that the ground beneath is feet is still brown and the blood on his hands is still sickeningly red. When German tanks come rolling in throwing around blue light instead of any kind of ammunition Bucky has ever seen before and Bucky gets captured, he stares into the eerily blue light because it’s the only thing keeping him sane, because the blue means Steve’s alive and if Steve’s alive then Bucky has to be too. His captors think that this means he’s something special, something _more evolved_ , they keep saying, something _ready_. They take him away from the other prisoners and strap him down to an operating table and jab his arms with needles, taking blood out and putting something else back in, and the pain colors Bucky’s vision bright red but at least Steve is at home and he’s safe and as long as he doesn’t get too sick, he’ll make it through and Bucky’s world will stay as bright as ever. Bucky holds onto that thought and repeats to himself over and over and over again who he is as they try to break him, as they try to wipe every bit of humanity from him so they can use them how they want, because as long as the world is colorful, Bucky is going to survive. He’s going to survive this and survive the war and he’s going to go home to Steve. He _has_ to.

Bucky is found in the dark and alone, muttering his own life to himself to keep himself sane, and the man who rescues him is tall and broad and stares at him like Bucky has the entire universe trapped under his skin. And then the man is yanking the restraints off of Bucky and pulling Bucky up and running reverent fingers over his skin, and Bucky’s vision shocks into overdrive and the dim light in the room is overwhelming shades of blue and green and purple, and Bucky almost sobs outright, because Steve is here, touching him, hands firm and strong like they’ve never been. 

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says instead of _what the hell did you let them do to you?_ or _why the fuck are you here?_ and follows Steve into battle the next day and the next and the next without question, because now that Steve is here and fighting and running headlong into gunfire every day, the old fear comes back, of Steve going where Bucky can’t, and Bucky wakes up gasping for breath, dreaming of all the ways he could lose Steve, wakes to a colorful world and Steve stroking his back, thinking every time that this war has already eaten so many men whole and one of these days, one of them is going to die. 

He’s right. And again, he’s wrong about which of them is going to do the leaving. 

He falls. Steve doesn’t.

  
**V.**

Steve feels rather than sees the moment Bucky’s body hits the ground, thousands of feet below the train that Steve is still clinging to, that Bucky couldn’t hold on to. Steve curls in on himself, the freezing winter air whipping around him, mission completely forgotten, and squeezes his eyes shut against the encroaching darkness, irrationally trying to fool himself into thinking that when he opens his eyes again, his gloves will still look the color of dark leather.

Steve drinks that night and discovers that he can’t get drunk anymore and keeps drinking anyways, pouring himself glass after glass, knowing that the liquor should be amber instead of this strange grey-black, needing the burning sensation in his throat to remind himself that he’s alive. Steve remembers, vaguely, when he was five and the news came that his father had been killed in action, remembers noticing the way his mother started holding onto things too tightly after that, accidentally snapping pencils in half when she wrote shopping lists or pressing bruises into her own skin when she clutched onto herself to keep herself together when she thought Steve wasn’t looking. Steve thinks he gets it now, the way his mother started clinging onto everything, hoping against hope that by clutching onto something hard enough, there might be a way to squeeze some color back into life. 

Peggy finds him and sits across the table from him in the deserted, hollowed out bar and brushes delicate hands over his hair like she knows what it’s like to lose something like this and says something about choices, says, “He damn well must’ve thought you were worth it.”

Not twenty-four hours later, Steve parrots her words back to her, something about choices, as he plunges Schmidt’s plane into the Arctic. He’s defeated Schmidt and now he’s eliminating the last major HYDRA threat to the world and he’s done his job and he’s so, so ready to leave. He’s ready to do what needs to be done and hopes that when he wakes up in whatever comes after this, after this monochrome, bleak existence, he’ll find Bucky there waiting for him and be able to see in color again. 

The cold comes up to greet him when the plane hits the ice, chilling him to the bone almost immediately, and all he can think is _I’m coming, Bucky. I’m coming home_.

  
**VI.**

The Winter Soldier deals in black and white and shades of grey. The Winter Soldier has never seen color before, and his handlers don’t mind, because it means that he has nothing personal to fight for, because it means that he’s easier to hollow out at the end of the day.

He meets a girl, once, when the year is something like 1956 or 1957, with soft, long hair and clever eyes, and he fights her, trains her before he kisses her, testing, and when he opens his eyes, the dark shade of her mouth remains stubbornly grey. The experience confuses him. He wonders why he was expecting it to be otherwise. He is a soldier, a spy, an assassin, a killer, not a lover. People like him weren’t built for love. It makes his handlers nervous anyways, and they start freezing him between missions just to be safe. Her name is scratched out of his head like everything else. 

The Winter Soldier is drawn in and out of cryo over the next several decades and only ages a small handful of years in the meantime, blinking awake each time in a world that looks slightly different than last time but for the constant monotony of it all – wake, kill, wipe, sleep, rinse, repeat – all in sterile white rooms with buzzing machines and anonymous scientists in white lab coats fussing over him and men in black skulking around the perimeter, armed to deal with those moments he gets agitated and lashes out, metal arm squeezing the life out of anything that gets too close. 

The Winter Soldier is defrosted in 2011 to stage the death of a politician who’s gotten in the way of HYDRA’s plans one too many times. He opens his eyes and shakes off the cold and doesn’t immediately notice anything different. White is still white even in a world of color, and it’s not until the Winter Soldier catches his reflection in the one-way mirror between the lab and the observation room that he notices that the star painted on his left shoulder is startlingly red and the color hits him in the gut, sharp and agonizing like he’s just been knifed. When his handlers come in to see what’s wrong, the Winter Soldier punches two of them through the wall until a third comes up and knocks him out. 

When he comes to, he’s strapped into the operation chair, mind buzzing with the static of the information being funneled into his head, prepackaged, specific, temporary, and the world around him is still jumping around him in jarring shocks of color. He’s put back in cryo ten hours later once the mission’s been completed, mind empty except for things he sees in flashes, sharp like memories, blue eyes, blonde hair. The Winter Soldier doesn’t dream, but if he did, he thinks that it would be something like this.

  
**VII.**

Steve is pulled out of the Arctic and Nick Fury tells him the year is 2011. Bucky has been dead for something like seventy years, and yet when Steve runs out of the SHIELD base and into the middle of Times Square in a dazed confusion, disoriented and afraid, it’s bright and loud, all neon colors and yellow taxis screeching around him as he runs through traffic. It shouldn’t be possible and yet it is, everything around him lit up like a Christmas tree, too many colors in a world that’s supposed to be all in shades of grey, and that’s the most unsettling thing about today, more than finding out that he’s still alive, more than finding out that he’s been asleep for decades.

Steve slowly realizes that it’s not all the time that it’s like this. Sometimes, Steve wakes up in the morning and opens his eyes open to a grey ceiling and black bed sheets and wonders if his brain has finally reset itself to show him the world as it should. But then there are mornings when the world around him has never been more colorful, and even still sometimes, he’ll be in the middle of something, sketching maybe or on his way to the gym, and he’ll blink and the air will flicker and switch between the two, suddenly plunging him into darkness or dragging him into unwarranted brightness. Steve begins to wonder if the crash did something to his brain, if the impact messed something up and this is some sort of torturous glitch, and he spends the first year of his new life carefully quiet about it all, because he gets roped into the Avengers and then working for SHIELD, and he’s grateful for something in his life, for a purpose, and he doesn’t want to jeopardize what he has by revealing that there might be something wrong with him. 

When he does talk about it, it’s to Natasha when they’re having a beer in his apartment after a mission that they both almost get killed on, because she’s got a certain level of discretion that Steve appreciates and over her years as a spy, she’s picked up all sorts of obscure knowledge that Steve doesn’t have and anyways, there’s a sort of intimacy that forms in the wake of near death experiences that Steve isn’t totally immune to. 

“Everyone’s different, Rogers,” she says. She’s painting her toenails a newly bought, very specific shade of purple that Steve can’t help noticing is the exact same color as that hoodie that Clint wears all the time. She smiles at him and says cryptically, “Sometimes the mind does things we don’t understand yet. Sometimes we just have to wait.”

So Steve waits. He waits and he goes on missions and goes on runs and has movie nights with Natasha and Clint and visits Tony in New York once or twice, teaching himself not to get lost in the moments when everything around him shifts. Then Nick Fury gets shot and Steve goes to confront his killer and finally gets his answer and it’s worse than anything he could’ve imagined.

  
**VIII.**

The Winter Soldier has grown accustomed to fighting in color over the past few years, learning to block out the rush of pigments around him to zero in on his targets and complete his missions. His handlers have grown more anxious in the intervening years after they discover his newfound sight, and they carefully and painstakingly comb over every single person the Winter Soldier has come into contact with, perhaps overzealous in their desire to eradicate any distractors from his life, killing off any possible threats, but the Winter Soldier continues, resolutely, to see a colorful world.

The Winter Soldier is woken to kill Nicholas J. Fury, an act that eventually precipitates what comes to be known as the SHIELD Civil War. He is chased across rooftops by a man far faster than any man should be and is attacked with, of all things, a shield. He runs only to be sent after this man again, instructed to kill him and anyone who might get in the way. The man, who the Winter Soldier keeps calling Steve in his head without quite knowing why, fights better than anyone the Winter Soldier has ever encountered before, countering almost every move like it’s a dance, choreographed perfectly to the two of them, balancing each other. The Winter Soldier is caught off guard by it all, by the sheer strength and relentlessness in Steve, so much so that Steve is able to catch onto the Winter Soldier’s mask and rip it off of him, slamming him into the ground in the process. 

Steve’s eyes grow wide when he sees the Winter Soldier’s face and he instantly drops out of his well-practiced fight stance to one of slack-jawed incredulity, all but gasping, “Bucky?”

The name hits the Winter Soldier like a truck, and even as the world brightens out and sharpens around this one man and that name, the Winter Soldier screws his face into a scowl and spits out like poison, “Who the hell is Bucky?” because it can’t be, because people like him weren’t meant for love. 

Later, the Winter Soldier is brought back to base and wiped clean, stripped down to only his instincts, and when he’s sent out to complete his mission, flickers of blonde hair and blue eyes still dance behind his eyelids, and even as he fights, pulls out knives and guns and hurls himself at Steve, dressed all in red, white, and blue, everything in sharp, dazzling clarity, the Winter Soldier can feel something pounding beneath the surface of his skin, something that Steve keeps shouting at him over and over and over again – _You know me. You’ve known me your whole life. You’re my friend._

The helicarrier explodes in a sudden shake, falling to pieces under them, and as Steve falls into the Potomac, the Winter Soldier feels something tug in his chest, like the world has been turned upside down, like déjà vu except that the Winter Soldier has no memories at all, no memories to confuse this with. The Winter Soldier jumps into the whirling black water after Steve before he can think and drags Steve to shore, barely able to stay afloat with the weight of his metal arm and the heavy combat suit, struggling against the pain of his dislocated shoulder and the rush of the current. 

The Winter Soldier walks away from the shore but doesn’t run away, instead holds onto the way Steve’s voice still echoes in his head, so familiar even in its novelty. The Winter Soldier drops off the grid, hides, and waits.

  
**IX.**

Steve runs all over the world, leading him and Sam on a wild goose chase through every dark corner of every country he can think of, searching, waiting, watching for a clue that will lead him to Bucky’s whereabouts. Steve runs for months longer than he probably should, exhausting all of his leads a thousand times over, propelled forward by the fact that each day is still bright like his childhood, because if Bucky is still alive, if he’s out there somewhere, no matter how lost he is, no matter how shattered he’s become, Steve has to look, he just _has_ to.

When he finally returns to the apartment he’d called home in the years after waking up from the ice, months later, he looks around at the bloodstains on the ground from where Fury was shot, at the glass scattered all over the living room from the broken window, the way all of his things are just slightly out of place from the SHIELD medical crew and then the SHIELD crime scene crew storming in and rushing Fury out and combing over every inch of space, trying to find evidence. It doesn’t feel a lot like home anymore, just reminds him of things that have slipped through his fingers, so he gathers up the things he cares about and heads over to Sam’s, where he stays in the spare bedroom for several weeks until he finds a new place for himself. 

His new apartment is very carefully nothing like his old one. Instead of small, cozy nooks and deep wood accents everywhere, Steve finds a loft that’s huge and airy and has enormous windows all along one wall facing the city, and he thinks that Natasha would’ve killed him when she saw the windows if she’d been helping him pick out his apartment, but he asks Tony to come by and install a top of the line security system and help him replace all the windows with something sturdier than glass so he never has to repeat the disaster with Fury ever again, so he thinks he’s fairly safe. 

Steve thinks about Bucky a lot as he decorates his new apartment, finding soft sheets in the same dark blue of Bucky’s favorite shirt and tacking up his drawings on the walls like he used to when they were teenagers and buying a stack of fluffy white towels like they’d never been able to afford growing up. He thinks about if Bucky’s ever going to find him, because Steve’s already tried his best and unless Bucky shows his hand again, Steve knows he’s never going to find Bucky. Steve wonders, if Bucky ever does come to find him, if Bucky would actually want to stay, if he’d take the home that Steve’s offering now that he’s finally made one, if there’s enough of Bucky left inside that head of his to recognize that there could be a life for them here, together. 

These days, when Steve dreams, he dreams in black and white and wakes screaming and gasping for breath like he’s still a child, like he still has asthma, until he sees the yellow twinkling of the city outside and reminds himself that this could still be.

  
**X.**

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes_.

The words in Steve’s voice keep bouncing around Bucky’s head, Bucky who has taken to calling himself Bucky again because that’s how he remembers it from before he fell, because that’s the last time he ever felt warm. Bucky runs all over the world, tracing the history he can remember and the fragments he picks up from old files. He runs and tries to put together who he is and spends his nights killing off those who have wronged him and his days chasing down his own history, until his entire life is a blur and he’s spiraling farther and farther from where he needs to be, where he wants to be. He can feel himself breaking at the seams with each HYDRA agent he crosses off his list, and he can feel his work getting sloppier, can feel the rage and the pain and the torture of not being himself for so long ripping him apart.

He fucks up for the first time somewhere in the outskirts of Washington DC. Either the HYDRA agent was more prepared than he’d expected or he really is losing his grip, and he’s not sure which it is at this point, but he’s more than willing to bet that it’s the latter rather than the former because Bucky hasn’t been getting much sleep these days, too scared of losing the colors in his eyes to close them for too long. He manages to kill the HYDRA agent, but not before he gets slashed along his side, and by the time he’s leaving, he’s too frantic and too pained and losing too much blood to be bothered to clean up properly and stumbles out into the DC night disoriented and scared. 

Bucky winds up in an apartment building he doesn’t recognize except for the vague inkling of an address and pounds on the door with his right hand, the left holding together the gaping wound that’s spilling blood all down his side, soaking his clothes, and when the door swings open a moment later, Bucky stumbles forward and collapses onto the beautiful white carpet, staining the ground bright red and hears a sharp intake of breath from above him. 

“Oh,” Steve’s voice comes, soft and sad and every bit as warm as Bucky remembers in the slivers of the memories he’s regained. “Oh, Bucky.”

He pulls Bucky in and shuts the door behind him, no questions asked, and there it is again, the blonde hair, the blue eyes, except now he can be sure that it’s real, that it’s not just his mind playing tricks on him, and it’s so much better than anything else in Bucky’s head. 

The last thing Bucky remembers before blacking out is Steve’s strong arms around him, holding him together, Steve murmuring softly, “I’ve got you. Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

  
**XI.**

Months pass, and Steve watches as Bucky slowly tries to figure out how to pull himself back together. Bucky doesn’t let him help at first, because he’s guarded and skittish like a wounded animal, but Steve does his best to help, filling in the details where Bucky only just remembers something like seeing the shapes of things through fog. Helping Bucky find himself again is like trying to find the lost parts of a wrecked ship in the sand; nothing ever fits quite the way either of them think, and it’s a slow process, but gradually, Bucky emerges from all the loose ends floating around, sure and solid and perhaps a bit more cautious than he was before, but still quietly sweet in the same way that Steve remembers.

Of course sometimes, sometimes, Bucky wakes up more the Winter Soldier than himself, all faraway eyes and sharp edges, and on those days, even looking at him pains Steve, but he presses on anyways, because this is what you do when you’ve seen the absolute best and worst in someone and still find yourself loving them more than the entire universe. In the early days, this means that Steve sleeps with his shield tucked under his side of the beautiful, huge bed he’d bought when he moved in, hoping for the space to be filled. In the early days, this means that sometimes, Bucky comes at him with knives and guns, teeth bared and snarling, and everything eventually breaks and stains red, and Steve ends up having to replace all of his furniture at least twice. 

Tony calls several times, concerned, because the security system keeps sensing threats and relaying the information to JARVIS, but every time, Steve says quietly, “No, no, we’re alright, Tony. We’re fine. Yes, I promise. Yes, I know it’s dangerous. It’s okay. We’re good. We’re fine.”

Steve says ‘we’ like he can’t imagine anything else. Perhaps it’s because despite the seventy years apart, he can only count a handful of waking years he’s spent apart from Bucky, and all the colorless days were some of the most miserable of his life. Perhaps it’s because he thinks that if he stops, it’ll be like giving up, and Steve’s never given up on anything in his life. 

They keep fighting, and Tony keeps calling and makes Natasha call and makes Sam call and even makes Clint call one time even though Clint doesn’t really know what else to say except for, “I’m sorry” and “Don’t die – again” and “Jesus, Steve, this is all really fucked up, y’know?”

And Steve does know (how could he not?), but Bucky keeps crawling into bed with him every night like it’s the only thing he knows anymore and curling himself all around Steve like Steve’s still less than a hundred pounds and Bucky’s eyes are still that dazzling blue that Steve thinks is probably his favorite color in the whole world, so Steve keeps saying ‘we’ and he keeps fighting and doesn’t think he could stop if he tried.

  
**XII.**

Bucky dreams again and these days, his dreams are in vivid, beautiful color. He dreams of Steve, small and delicate and in his arms, of Steve huge and strong and unwaveringly warm in the face of war and death. And when Bucky wakes up, Steve is still huge but less so compared to Bucky now, quietly patching up new wounds and pressing reverent kisses onto old scars, and somewhere along the way, Bucky stops wondering about the ‘how’ or the ‘why’ of it all, just lets himself be taken care of for the first time in his entire life. Lets himself feel wanted. Lets himself feel loved.

It’s what gives him the courage, he thinks, to learn and relearn how to push back against the demons in his head, to figure out how to be his own person again, and it feels strangely familiar, like Steve has been inspiring greater things in him his entire life. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t wake up some mornings feeling like a stranger in his own skin, metal arm half a moment away from closing around the pale, lightly pink column of Steve’s throat. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t spend more days than he’d like trying to figure out what it means to be human again, but it’s something. And on the mornings that he wakes up solidly in his own mind, Steve keeps smiling that proud smile at him that lights up the entire room, makes everything feel sharper and more vibrant than ever, makes Bucky feel so aware of being alive and in love and himself, and there’s something to be said for that too.

“I love you,” Steve says, and the first time it happens, it’s over breakfast, and it startles Bucky so much that he crushes his cup in his fist, porcelain scattering everywhere, because there’s something in the saying of it that’s different than just knowing it in the pale blue-green of Steve’s veins under his milk-colored skin, the deep purple of his shirt, the gold shine of sun filtering through Steve’s sleep-mussed hair. 

“Why?” Bucky asks, sounding sharper than he means, even though he’s too old and too cynical to think that there’s any reason left in this, and Steve just smiles into his coffee, the tips of his ears glowing faintly pink. 

“I love you,” Steve says again when they’re folding laundry a couple weeks later, and Bucky almost rips the shirt he’s holding in two.

“Stop it,” Bucky says, though his heart’s not really in it, and stares at the rainbow of shirts spread out for him to tuck away, Steve’s soothing blues and greens and reds mixed up with Bucky’s dark blacks and browns and navies.

“I love you,” Steve says late in bed one night, months later, as he presses his mouth to Bucky’s, quiet and gentle and heartfelt.

Bucky bites down on Steve’s lower lip for no other reason than simply because he can, because he likes the way Steve groans soft and low at the back of his throat, and when he pulls away, Steve’s mouth turns a brilliant, bright red, and Bucky feels something warm explode in his chest.

“I love you too, you idiot,” Bucky grumbles and swallows Steve’s laugh in his own mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are very, very appreciated guys!
> 
> come find me over on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/) if you like!


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